With the development of broadband technologies, cable and satellite television services are increasingly providing their customers with VOD services. In a typical VOD system, the cable or satellite multiple service/systems operator (“MSO”) receives audiovisual content such as features, which may be movies, television shows, or other types of feature content, and the feature's associated previews and graphics files (a feature and its associated previews and graphics files may be collectively referred to herein as “content”) from content providers, stores the content locally, and then transmits the content to a viewer upon the viewer's request. Content providers generally transmit content to MSOs via satellite transmissions or via a high-speed terrestrial-based network using appliances commonly referred to as pitchers. To receive the transmissions from the content providers, MSOs deploy a number of appliances commonly referred to as catchers. Catchers receive the transmissions from the content providers and, after receiving a complete file, relays the file to a VOD server. The VOD server then provides content to consumers of the MSO upon demand by the consumers.
Because a particular MSO will receive transmissions from a number of different content providers, each of whom may use different formats when transmitting their own content, problems may arise when the MSO attempts to process content prior to providing the content to its consumers. For example, file processing problems may arise due to extensible markup language (“XML”) formatting issues, such as, e.g., a content provider may place metadata associated with the content in its files that the MSO's system regards as non-compliant data. As a result, metadata provided by various content providers may be inconsistent, unmanageable, or interpreted incorrectly when received by the MSO. Further, content providers and MSOs may use different and/or proprietary file transfer systems that may contribute to incompatibilities and transmission problems. Problems may also arise if a file contains corrupted data. As a result of the metadata issues as well as the file corruption issues, content may not be available on the VOD servers when scheduled.
Receiving data streams from many content providers has also limited the data available to a MSO that may be used to monitor the flow of VOD assets through its system. As a result, MSOs currently spend an inordinate amount of human resources to manually monitor and intervene with content management. The problem of a lack of visibility of the flow of VOD assets is also exacerbated by current content distribution schemes in which a content provider may independently operate the content input portion of the distribution process, third party aggregators, distributors, and other enablers operate the encoding and metadata management portion, the content upload portion, and the download to catchers portion of the distribution process, and the MSOs operate the content distribution to end users portion of the process. That is, currently, a content provider may be responsible for providing content and metadata, an aggregator, distributor, or other third party enabler may be responsible for combining the content and metadata, uploading the content to satellites, and then downloading the content to catcher appliances, and a MSO may be responsible for delivering content to its end users or consumers (references herein to “end users” are intended to refer to either an end user or a consumer). Because of the current lack of visibility of the flow of VOD assets, content management problems are difficult to isolate and resolve by the MSO, the content providers, or any other party in the content distribution chain.
Consequently, there is a need for systems and methods that allow a MSO and content providers to resolve transmission problems with regard to VOD content transmissions and to provide metadata that will comply with MSO requirements.
There is also a need for systems and methods that offer greater visibility and control over the transmission of VOD content, thereby allowing proactive monitoring of the assets being transmitted within the system.
There is also a need for systems and methods that offer greater visibility over the usage information of the content and that allow for proactive programming decisions based on the performance or usage of such content.